Through the construct of time travel, The Ministry of Time considers modern “advances” in social views and values from the perspective of past eras. This distanced perspective shows present-day cultural norms in a different light. An exploration of developments in areas like gender equality, colonialism, enfranchisement, and racial diversity concludes that social change isn’t linear; instead, many things considered advances have unintended consequences that make them as bad as the things they were meant to improve upon, while other forms of progress haven’t gone nearly far enough. The narrator outlines this conclusion when she notes:

I didn’t understand that my value system—my great inheritance—was a system, rather than a far point on a neutral, empirical line that represented progress. Things were easier for me […]; my drugs were cleaner, my goods were abundant, my rights were enshrined. Was this not progress? I struggled with the same bafflement over history, which I still understood in rigid, narratively linear terms (115).

The plot incorporates the comparison of social values from different eras through the concept of a government experiment designed to determine if individuals can adjust to time travel, both physically and psychologically.